Spaces of the State
As part of this year’s central theme of the Open House Slovenia Festival – Future Heritage – we invite you to join us for a thematic festival weekend titled Spaces of the State, curated in collaboration with this year’s invited OHS festival curator, architect, curator, and publicist, Assistant Professor Dr. Miloš Kosec.
“When the Congress of Ljubljana took place in 1821 to determine the future order of Europe, conservative kings and emperors, together with their ministers, stayed in the homes of local nobility and townspeople, danced in the city’s halls, and paraded through the streets and squares. Two hundred years later, in a time of democracy that has swept away hereditary rulers and aristocracy, state and high-level protocol events now prefer to unfold far from the public eye—most often on the fenced and guarded rural grounds of the former feudal estate of Brdo. For photographers and social media, the state chooses scenes of rural idyll, while for its everyday operations it favors generic, introverted, and invisible office spaces, often even rented from private investors.
Three in-depth OHS tours—of the Brdo estate near Kranj, Villa Podrožnik, and Republic Square—will open up questions about the relationship between architecture, design, politics, representation, and democracy. Brdo is an old feudal estate which, in the 20th century, became a stage for state representation and, in the new millennium, Slovenia’s main venue for international and European diplomacy. Villa Podrožnik, a bourgeois villa built on the site of a former manor, was converted into a protocol residence after World War II. Republic Square is not a historical adaptation but an ambitious modernist new construction, built to meet the needs of republican representation and the administrative apparatus—although later developments meant it never fully served that role.
What can these three spaces tell us about the historical relationship between the state and public space? How are they managed today, and why does the state no longer inscribe itself into space the way it once did? How did the state once shape places and, through them, set architectural and design standards? Why does the state today prefer to remain invisible? Where is the state’s place among its citizens? Why are key state buildings not understood as the shared home of all citizens, but instead often excessively closed off and guarded? What does such an approach to space, heritage, and public responsibility mean for the future of Slovenian architecture and design? Why is it not considered utopian to talk about a nearly billion-euro increase in the military budget, but seen as utopian to expect the state to spend a few dozen million to acquire Ravnikar’s TR2 tower at Republic Square—a building originally designed for the state itself? How is the citizens’ access to and interaction with the state also an essential component of national security and cohesion? And finally: why is building a more democratic and inclusive space of the state not merely a matter of representation, but primarily one of responsibility, economy, and setting a good example?”
— Miloš Kosec
Thematic tours will take place from May 16 to 18. Registration is available via the link.